New Europe Is Born in Dublin
By John Spain 
IT’S nice to come home to a party. Last Saturday was May 1 and the Spain family, myself included, was still jet-lagged after our three week visit to Florida and the long flights home.
More of that anon, and more about the “innocence” of the Three Amigos in Columbia, that embarrassing report on Sinn Fein, the senior Irish judge who was paying for child porn and other stories that happened in my absence.
But first the party. No, it was not a welcome home party for the Spain clan, although it felt a bit like that. It was, of course, the party to celebrate the expansion of the European Union which came into effect on May 1. And it was happening in Dublin because at the moment Ireland holds the presidency of the EU.
So last Saturday morning in Dublin we woke up to the birth of the new Europe. The addition of the 10 new member states creates the biggest enlargement of the EU to date, resulting in a union of 25 countries and more than 450 million people. It also marks the final ending of the post-war division of Europe.
It was a happy day, celebrating a defining moment in the history of the continent, a day in which we in Ireland could feel justifiably proud since it had come during the Irish presidency.
The presidency is rotated among the member nations, with each nation holding it for six months. What it means is that the nation holding the presidency takes the lead in all EU business.
We took over the presidency when most of the preparatory work for the enlargement had been done. But it needed careful handling to avoid any last minute glitches, and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern and his ministers passed this test with flying colors.
The Irish have also breathed new life into the failed attempts to agree a new constitution for the enlarged EU, to the point where a deal now looks possible.
So, since Ireland holds the presidency, the ceremonies to mark the formal enlargement of the EU across Eastern Europe, probably the most significant event in the history of the EU since the war, were being held in Dublin. Heads of government from all over Europe were here at the weekend to mark the event.
They came from the 10 new entrants, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta. They came from the existing 15 EU members like Ireland, the U.K., France, Germany and so on.
And there were also delegations from Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, three countries who hope to join in the next few years (when their economies and democratic credentials meet the requirements), which will bring the total number of member nations to 28.
Now if there’s one thing the Irish know how to do it’s throw a party. Normally EU events are deadly boring, tied up in red tape and frozen in formality.
There’s so much bureaucracy involved that ordinary people get alienated. But this weekend was different, simply because the Irish were running the show.
Saturday was dubbed the Day of Welcomes. Yes, there was the formal stuff outside President Mary McAleese’s residence in the Phoenix Park, a ceremony conducted in brilliant sunshine and carried live on TV.
One by one, the flags of all 25 nations were brought forward and presented to the leader of each country before being raised aloft.
Children from each country, whose families now live in Ireland and who are in school here, carried the flags. This made the ceremony human and simple and also underlined how Ireland, like the rest of Europe, is becoming at once more diverse and more unified.
The heads of state attended a dinner in Farmleigh, the great house in the Phoenix Park once the home of part of the Guinness brewing family and now used as a venue for great state occasions. Ahern decreed that although much negotiation remains to be done on the new EU constitution, this was to be purely a social affair, a time for the leaders of the new countries to get to know their counterparts in the existing EU countries, their new family.
The evening was a great success and the lack of formality was much appreciated by the East European countries who probably have much more in common with us than the snooty French, for example.
There was also a light show in the Dublin skyline, a huge fireworks display and a European Fair in the center of Dublin in Merrion Square in which each member nation had a big marquee tent to show off their culture, food, music, national dress etc.
Crowds of ordinary Dubliners came along to get a taste of the east of Europe, now part of ourselves. This was highly successful, and much strange salami and smelly cheese was consumed. But the most popular tent belonged to the Dutch, where they were giving away free tumblers of Heineken.
One of the really inspired ideas the Irish government had was to get the celebrations out of Dublin and spread them across Ireland. So 10 of our cities and major towns were twinned with the 10 new member nations and had parties and parades of welcome.
This localized and personalized the Day of Welcomes, and one could see that that the delegations from the smaller places like Latvia or Lithuania or Cyprus really liked the atmosphere in Galway or Kilkenny or Sligo.
Close to 1,000 journalists, radio and TV crews from across the 10 new member states and around the world were here for the weekend, and TV coverage of the events around Ireland were beamed into more than one billion homes worldwide.
No doubt there will be a tourism pay-off from this raised international profile for Ireland. But that’s for another day. For now, the knowledge that we did an important job well is all that matters.
There was one disappointing aspect to the happy weekend, and that was the atmosphere of foreboding about the havoc the anti globalization brigade might cause, unable to resist the chance to confront so many leaders.
These are the long-haired, placard waving airheads (mostly from nice well-off families) who want to stop war, world trade, oil, globalization, meat eating, cruelty to animals, Starbucks and so on. They are so ludicrously naive that you almost feel sorry for them.
But there is a dangerous element among them. About 50 of the ringleaders, veterans of trouble elsewhere, came in here from the U.K.
The Gardai (police) had to take measures to prevent anything going wrong, and all Garda leave was cancelled for the weekend. This put a dampener in advance on the day and probably kept many families away from the city center. The newspapers were full of reports of a massive police presence, of water cannons being deployed for the first time, of hospitals being on stand-by.
The slogan of some of those who were protesting was “Reclaim the Streets.” But the threat they posed meant that whole streets in the city center were shut down, as was the Phoenix Park, which could have been the venue for a great outdoor party.
It’s a slogan that might well be adopted by the rest of us the next time this motley army tries to “liberate” Dublin. We should be reclaiming our streets from them.
Thankfully, although there were some ugly scenes outside the gates to the Phoenix Park on Saturday night, only a few hundred protestors got involved. Overall, the protestors were not allowed to spoil our party, and this was important since the significance of the day appeared to be totally lost on those who were out to make mischief.
Ironically, many of those who were protesting were doing so because they are opposed to any international structure over which they feel ordinary people do not have control. Yet the enlargement of the European Union, more than anything else, is about building democratic values and supporting human rights in the 10 new member states, eight of which are former Com-munist countries.
It’s also worth remembering that when Ireland joined the then EEC in 1973, our GDP was 60% of the European average; last year it was 125%. There is a huge quality of life gap to be bridged between many of the new states now joining and the established members like ourselves. But again that is what the EU is for, helping ordinary people to better their lives.
Peace and prosperity is what the EU is about. The weekend’s enlargement deserved to be celebrated and we played our part.
And a motley crew of muddled protesters were not allowed to spoil our day. Which was as it should be.
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